I'd seen a lot of
promos for The Whispers, a new television series airing on
ABC at a time
when there is usually nothing decent on television. Summer
is when the reality shows
begin to surface and is known affectionately...for those of us old enough
to remember...rerun season. In this age of On Demand
television and TV on DVD,
the network folks have realized that the viewers want something intelligent to
watch. Enter The Whispers, loosely based on a short story called Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury. I didn't know The Whispers was based on a
short story at the time. The previews I saw led me to believe I was about to
watch a really cool new ghost story...but what I got was so much more!

As The Whispers
opens, we see Harper Weil (Abby Ryder Forston), a tiny, adorable little
girl, talking to an unseen entity and agreeing to play some sort of game. Mom
(Autumn Reeser) thinks it's adorable that her daughter is playing with an
imaginary friend, strangely named Drill, and thinks nothing further of it.
Later, we see Harper gathering things for Drill - normal kid things like chalk...and
some not so normal things like a hammer
and a screwdriver.

When Mom can't find
Harper in the house, she discovers that her daughter has climbed into the
family's tree house, something Harper is forbidden to do alone. Angry and more
than a little distressed by Harper's unwillingness to listen to her mother, Mom
climbs the long ladder
to the tree house and, if only to get Harper to climb
down with her, stands on the X drawn in the center of the tree house so Harper
can win her game with Drill. Predictably, Mom falls through the floor, thanks
to Harper's following Drill's instructions to the letter...she's apparently very
good at games.

Recently widowed
mom and FBIchild specialist
Claire Bennigan (Lily Rabe) is called in to
investigate the incident. The conversations she has with Harper lead her to
believe that there may be someone behind the seemingly imaginary friend named
Drill. As she delves deeper, using the information that Harper gives her, she
finds that another little boy played a similar game with what his mother
believed was an imaginary friend. Also named Drill, this friend managed to get
this young boy to create an amateur bomb. He was to lead his mother to the
bomb's location, but at the last minute realized that maybe this was a bad thing
and not really a game. He ended up killing himself to save his mother.

In both cases, a
mysterious man (Milo Ventimiglia) covered in tattoos
has been seen at the crime scene. We happen
to know that this man ends up in the hospital
with a case of severe amnesia
after passing out writing the name Minx. This just happens to be the name of
the next little girl (Kylie Rogers) on Drill's list.

Meanwhile, Wes
Lawrence (Barry Sloane), a
Defense Department Operative, is halfway around the
world investigating a strange electrical phenomenon and something stranger found
at its core - a United States military plane
whose pilot had no reason to be in
that location and was believed missing some thousand miles away in the Arctic.
Whose the pilot you may ask? Well that would be the husband of Claire Bennigan
who soon discovers, thanks to a sketch artist
rendering, is also the mysterious
man from her case's crime scenes.

Okay, there are a
lot of twists in this show, but I think I have things figured out thanks to the
warblings of the adorable...and incredibly creepy...Harper Weil. I definitely
don't think we're dealing with ghosts here. No, sir! What we are dealing with
is either an alien
or a government experiment gone awry that is enabling an
entity to speak to little children of a certain highly imaginative and
vulnerable age through electric/electronic waves. The electricity
part comes
into play when we notice the subtle clues left for us that become less subtle as
the episode progresses: the static on Mom's phone
just before the door opens on
its own, the flash of the porch light
in the middle of the day as Mom prepares
to climb the tree house, the electrical charges ranging around the crashed
plane, the flickering of lights, etc.

Now, maybe this
story seems like it has been done before...and maybe it has, but I think The
Whispers is definitely worth watching. Why? Because the kids on this show
creep me the heck out! Never mind the other actors in this series, it's the
kids that are the stars here. Cute as buttons, they end up doing and saying the
most disturbing things all in the name of winning Drill's game. Yikes! I've
never been so creeped out by a television show in all my life. Seriously, there
were shivers running down my spine by the end of the first episode. And, did I
mention that Drill has just gotten to Claire Bennigan's son (Kyle Harrison
Breitkopf), allowing him the ability to hear again in exchange for playing the
game? Oh man, I can't wait to see how things play out on the next episode of
The Whispers airing at Mondays at 10pm EST on ABC.